Someday, tourists trying to get to the Rocky statue may no longer find themselves playing a real-life version of the old video game Frogger across several lanes of speeding traffic.
The hectic stretch of Spring Garden Street/Benjamin Franklin Parkway in front of the Art Museum could be shut down and converted to a grassy park, extending Eakins Oval all the way up to the sidewalk. Drivers would be directed to go around the bottom of the oval or off in another direction instead.
If it happens, a major reconfiguration of that block — and of the larger Parkway area down to Logan Square — is likely years away. But after more than a decade of discussions, plans to make the nearly mile-long expanse a more inviting place to visit appear to be inching forward.
The state Department of Transportation recently announced a $1.8 million grant, funded from red-light camera fines, that will pay for a survey of Eakins Oval and surrounding streets as well as environmental clearances and preliminary design work, a Parks and Recreation Department spokesperson said.
The spokesperson declined to describe the planned improvements, but confirmed that the work is part of the larger, long-range planning effort.
“This work has been conceptualized and underway for about four years, and it was identified during and throughout the Reimagine Ben Franklin Parkway process as near-term, early-action geometric improvements,” she said.
The work will cover an area spanning 21st Street and the Parkway, 24th Street and Kelly Drive, and Pennsylvania Avenue from 22nd to 27th street, the spokesperson said.
In addition, in a couple of months the city will release the Reimagine initiative’s full conceptual plan for a redesign of the roadway.
Based on comments from thousands of people who have participated in surveys and meetings, one of the broader project’s top goals is to make the area a destination where locals and visitors want to hang out, rather than a thoroughfare they speed through on their way somewhere else.
That’s according to Nicholas Anderson, executive director of the Parkway Council, a nonprofit representing area institutions and property owners that is part of the planning effort.
“What people wanted to see change first was, how can the Parkway better function as a sort of day-to-day park?” Anderson said. “Whether it be much more regular and smaller-scale programming activations, or landscapes that feel more inviting — gardens, more benches, more playgrounds, things like that — where it’s a place that isn’t just for huge special events or that you walk through from one point to another.”
Bulldozers in the future?
Anderson stressed that, despite the city’s plans to do some work on the Oval, planning on the broader project is still in an early phase.
There will still be more opportunities for feedback and design changes before the Parks and Recreation department and the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability commission engineering plans, identify funding, and have workers start breaking up asphalt, he said.
“We’re far away from bulldozers,” he said.
That said, last August planners laid out a possible four-stage plan that would begin with the Eakins Oval expansion, making it sort of “the front lawn for Philadelphia,” he said.
In future years, the city could close the Parkway’s narrow outer lanes to cars and convert them to bike lanes, walking paths, and green space, according to designs posted on the Reimagine the Benjamin Franklin Parkway website.
“Right now, the Parkway is heavily chopped up into little pieces that are not particularly usable, or usable in any way. Can we, through various traffic engineering strategies, still maintain all those connections, but start to knit together some of those spaces into larger more usable spaces?” Anderson said.
Those connected areas could then be combined together “into something larger and more usable and more functional for folks throughout the year,” he said. Public restrooms, drinking fountains, play spaces, and other amenities could be added.
Another stage of work could expand Logan Square beyond the current circular park and fountain in the center, making it a proper square park, like Rittenhouse and Washington squares. The traffic rotary would be removed and cars would use the surrounding street grid instead. Logan Square could also be further expanded over a Vine Expressway cap, Anderson said.
Beyond that, possible long-term steps focus on improving connections to the Schuylkill River and beyond. That could include putting part of Spring Garden Street south of the museum underground, with a walkable green space over it to provide easy access to the river, and creating a “biking and pedestrian street” on the Martin Luther King Jr. Drive Bridge.
Work on MLK Bridge is already underway as part of an unrelated rehabilitation project. It was shut down last March and is scheduled to reopen in spring 2025.
Restoring a verdant vision
The current planning effort represents something of a return to late 19th and early 20th century visions of the Parkway area as a green entryway to the sprawling watershed that includes Fairmount and Wissahickon Valley parks.
The idea of building a road from Broad Street to Fairmount Park dates back to 1871, and in the 1910s work began to raze thousands of buildings and construct a boulevard terminating at a new museum atop Fairmount hill. The current Parkway and Logan Square are largely based on a 1917 design by French architects who were inspired by grand Parisian boulevards like the Champs-Elysees.
The Museum of Art and other monumental buildings sprung up along the new Parkway in the 20s and 30s, but the area’s recreational potential was increasingly limited by its use as a highway into Center City and by a complex traffic pattern that includes intersections with Kelly Drive, Martin Luther King Drive, the Spring Garden Bridge, and other streets.
Planner Edmund Bacon turned Eakins Oval into an 8-acre traffic circle with parking in 1960, and spur ramps were built nearby to I-76 and I-676.
“Popular as it is for gatherings, the Parkway has never been a successful public space,” Ashley Hahn wrote for WHYY’s PlanPhilly in 2018. “It can seem dauntingly long to walk, dominated by the civic scale of large residential and institutional buildings, with few pedestrian amenities.”
New public and private investments began arriving in the late 1990s, such as the relocated Barnes Foundation, new tree plantings, an expansion and renovation of the Museum of Art, and the creation of Sister Cities Park at Logan Square. The annual Welcome America Fourth of July festival had been launched in 1993, and the first Made in America music festival was held on Labor Day in 2012.
In 2013, PennPraxis planners released More Park, Less Way, a detailed study with recommendations for improvements. That led to a series of yearly summer pop-ups in the Oval and other events to draw people to the area.
Just before the pandemic, the Parkway Council reinvented itself to focus on transformation of the roadway into a grand public park and helped spearhead a new planning effort, Anderson said.
A competition to pick a designer produced a number of creative conceptual ideas for reconfiguring the Parkway. The selected firm, Design Workshop, launched a community engagement process, with a formal solicitation of community input that began in 2022 and wrapped up last September. The results are helping shape the upcoming plan.
Planners at one point suggested that some of the reconstruction of the Parkway could happen within three years. An earlier version of the project website said, “implementation of key aspects of this… plan is intended to be able to be achieved in time for the 2026 celebration of the semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”
That timeline appears to have been dropped. The site now mentions a possible completion schedule of five to 15 years, and an alternate plan that would take longer than 15 years.
While the city is moving ahead with the initial grant-funded work on Eakins Oval, “other specific improvements for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway redesign have not been finalized or decided yet,” the Parks and Recreation spokesperson said. “The city expects to share the final redesign plan as part of a public announcement this spring.”
The title of the Parks and Recreation spokesperson was corrected.
